Alaska needs a plan: it needs it now.

• Author: Lawer, Betsy
• Position: ECONOMY - Viewpoint essay

"We were fine before oil and we'll be just fine again without oil."

Every time I hear that statement, I shake my head.

I was born and raised in Alaska before there was oil. It's easy to romanticize about what it was like then.

I grew up running through the sprinkler in our yard, seeing how many sisters I could convince to cram themselves into a parrot cage (and then locking it...), or loading into Pop's "Weasel" (track vehicle) to ride down to the Westchester swamp--catching sticklebacks and tadpoles in the summer and playing "Crack the Whip" on flying saucers in the winter. Pop was like the Pied Piper of the neighborhood. Kids ran out of their houses, pulling on jackets as they clambered onto the "Weasel" when he drove past.

Not only was there no Internet, video games or cell phones, there was no TV yet in Alaska. We learned early how to entertain ourselves. In the summer, the neighborhood challenge was to see how many bees you could catch in a jar at the same time, without getting stung. I'm proud to have held the record for the neighborhood, and don't remember ever getting stung.

I loved animals and was mad about horses. While other girls were reading Nancy Drew, I was reading every Black Stallion book in the series. Pop thought a horse was too expensive to maintain in Alaska, so I never had one. But one morning I woke to discover a burro tethered to my bedroom window!

ROMANCE VS. REALITY?

Like I said, it's easy to romanticize that time in Alaska, before oil. But life was hard.

Our economy was pretty simple--small, thin and seasonal. Total employment, averaged over the year, was about 90,000 jobs. There were few Alaska businesses providing services to our natural resource-producing industries or to households. Alaskans were poor, relatively speaking--the average household income was 10 percent to 20 percent below the U.S. average, all while the cost of living was significantly higher than the rest of the country. Fishing and construction associated with federal spending meant there were lots of private jobs in the summer, but the economy virtually shut down when winter arrived. Half the number of people worked in the winter as in the summer. I used to think of it as the lights going out for the winter--which they often did, literally, in those days.

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

A change in the dollars circulating in Alaska had an overly dramatic effect. Incremental amounts of money injected into or taken out of such a small economy had an immediate...